On Video Editing

My earliest memory of a real community is 249 Unit, a video editing group I joined in 2018, when I was around fifteen. I don’t remember how I found it. I only remember the texture of being inside it: the average age was seventeen, a few outliers in their early twenties, and the whole thing had the specific energy that comes when people are young and making things together before anyone is doing it for money.

That’s where I met Canon , Kurama , Mokhtar , Zvin , Tomato , Pixel , Karfast , M2A , Mahmoud , Omer , Crim , and many others, some who glowed in the best places, some who eventually stepped away from the craft. The community was vibrant in a way that communities rarely are. it was a core memory for everyone who was genuinely part of it. we were building things together, enjoying everything, not performing enjoyment, actually having it.

The Role I Played

It was also the first time I understood what role I naturally played when surrounded by people. I was organized by instinct, so I built a ranking system inside the community, six tiers, first tier being the best editors, sixth tier where you started. You accumulated points based on judged improvement and ascended. we opened applications. I managed the technical side of filtering who could enter and who couldn’t. I called it checkpoint.

What I didn’t realize at the time, and only recognize now looking back, is that I was practicing something close to cultural curation, selecting for people whose chemistry would preserve the harmony of the group rather than fracture it. I don’t know exactly how I sensed it, but I could feel at fifteen whether adding a particular person would create friction or flow. I think that’s a basic human capacity, one most people don’t get to exercise that young. I got lucky.

The Feeling of Exporting Something

When I opened my iPhone 6s Plus and edited on Alight Motion , exporting a finished clip was the best feeling I knew. That was peak happiness for me at the time, until 2021, when I got my first MacBook and started editing in After Effects. After Effects changed the shape of the feeling entirely. it wasn’t happiness anymore. it was closer to peace. I would drown in it and not want to resurface. I loved every single part of the process, not just the final frame, but the layers, the keyframes, the small decisions no one would ever notice but me. video editing is something I love in a way I’ve never been able to fully explain, and I’ve stopped trying.

I became a first tier editor in 249 Unit. I joined several other communities after, mostly EA Sports graphics, played a part in the PMSL, Pubg Mobile Sudanese League, championship graphics team. Then Tomato and I started building personal brands around editing for YouTube streamers and gamers. I was sixteen. I was making myself financially autonomous before I fully understood what that meant, and it felt genuinely good.

Dart

At some point I decided to push further. not out of greed, but because I could see that there was real talent around me and a real gap the talent could fill. I wanted to build a proper advertising agency.

So I went and actually researched what services an advertising agency typically offers ,designers, video editors, logo designers, social media managers, are the asset, the services I knew, and then looked at who inside my network was already learning adjacent things. Some were experimenting with Photoshop. others were moving into Illustrator, into art. they weren’t polished, but I could see who was learning faster. I picked based on that. not on current skill, but on learning velocity. that distinction mattered more than I understood at the time.

Mustafa brought us our first client, a Sudanese restaurant that wanted a full social media campaign: account creation, ongoing management, posters, videos. Mahmoud handled the logo. Mustafa handled design. Taj Eldeen took social media management. and we moved. we were building something real, all of us under twenty.

Then university started. High school ended and life demanded more of us than a side hustle could survive. the agency dissolved slowly. and I stepped away.

Stopped Producing

When I entered university, I stopped listening to music. and because my editing until then was entirely music driven, the rhythm of a cut, the way a transition lands on a beat, stopping music meant stopping that entire body of work. I deleted everything. the videos, the pages, the years of craft I had publicly accumulated. all of it, gone.

There’s a specific kind of grief in that. not the grief of losing someone or something taken from you, but the grief of choosing to delete a version of yourself you once loved. it hurt more than I expected. I kept having to stop my hand from opening After Effects out of reflex. my head itched for it. I had lost clients, I had lost the audience, I had lost the accumulated momentum of years, and now I had to relearn an adjacent version of the craft, not from zero, but without the fluency that years of practice had given me.

Learning a New Language in the Same Craft

Slowly I started again. and the first video I made without music, the first one in this new chapter, felt like learning to walk differently.

I kept creating videos of quotes that resonated with me. by late 2022 I had made the decision clearly in my own mind: I don’t want to make money from video editing. I don’t want it to be a job. it is something I do to feed a part of myself that doesn’t respond to any other kind of feeding. I edit out of autotelic instinct, the doing is the point, not what comes from it. video editing slowly became the primary format through which I express myself, and the more I trusted that, the more my own touch and voice inside it started to form.

I have many stories about video editing, motion design, the people I’ve worked alongside, the projects that didn’t survive and the ones that did. I’ll keep sharing them here.